Then and Now: the National

When it opened on 1 November 1905, the National hotel had accommodation for 250 guests, making it bigger than any other hotel in Cairo at the time save for Shepheard’s. It had a prominent on location on Suleyman Pasha Street (now Talaat Harb) and serious money was put into its promotion: witness the posters promoting the hotel’s imminent arrival, above and below, commissioned from the firm of Richter & Co of Napoli, which produced artwork for top hotels in Italy and Spain, and as far afield as Cape Town and Shanghai. (Why two variants of the poster, I don’t know.)

The National was described soon after opening as providing excellent accommodation both to visitors and permanent residents of Cairo for, “unlike some of the more pretentious, establishments it is open all year round”. The hotel’s billiard room and bar were directly accessible from the street for access to non-hotel guests, another indicator that this was a far less snobbish establishment than the likes of Shepheard’s or the nearby Savoy. It offered suites for long-term stays and families, and dispensed with the requirement for evening dress in the dining room.

All of which, combined with reasonable rates, made it attractive to colonial civil servants and members of the military on Cairo postings. So although the hotel rarely gets mentioned in travel books it crops up plenty in accounts of Cairo during the war years and in letters from soldiers. Australian war artist George Lambert (1873–1930) was at the National for about a month in April 1918 during which time he spent several days with the Imperial Camel Corps at Abbassia making studies of the camels and their gear: this is one of them, below:

In the World War II memoirs of three pilots the place is described as the “lap of low-level luxury” full of non-combatant officers with ranks as high as general. Jewish-Italian double agent Renato Levi who worked for British intelligence and whose identity and career were revealed for the first time in the recently published Double Cross in Cairo, made the National his base for a time in 1941. Spy writer Philip Kerr uses the hotel in his novel One From the Other as the venue for a meeting with Adolf Eichmann.

When it opened the hotel’s proprietor was Alsace-born PE Hergel who had previously been the manager of the Tewfik Palace hotel at Helwan but the name most closely associated with the place is that of George Calomiris. He took over the running of the National perhaps in the 1930s – he was certainly running it during the war years. He was very rich, rumoured to be one of Egypt’s numerous wartime millionaires. He owned the Kit Kat cabaret, where for a time the floorshow starred Hekmat Fahmy, the most rousing of all the Egyptian bellydancers. According to Major AW Samson’s I Spied Spies (Harrap & Co, 1965) Calomiris was a notorious homosexual who regularly fell foul of the British military authorities for offering large sums of money to young soldiers as an enticement to desert and shack up with him. Calomiris reportedly came to a sticky end, murdered in his room at the hotel.

The hotel was still in business in December 1974 when Steve Jobs’s biological father John Jandali accompanied a bunch of American university undergrads to Cairo on a study trip. A respected professor at the University of Puget Sound, Washington, Jandali had been running a course “Egypt Since the 1952 Revolution”. His party checked into the National, which was the last place the students saw Jandali as eleven days later he quietly checked out and fled the country having gambled away everyone’s money at a casino. It took intervention from the US embassy to settle the hotel bill so the abandoned students could get home.

When the National stopped being a hotel I don’t know. It had definitely ceased functioning by the 1980s, by which time it had been turned over to commercial lets. In the 1990s half of the building was knocked down but oddly the northern half was left intact, as it still is today, on the corner of Talaat Harb and Abdel Khalek Sarwat streets.

After many years lying empty the site next door was eventually filled, with this…